Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Feel free to clarify: has he resigned or not? The Abbott government took this as an opportunity to use Minister Mathias Cormann to push the changes once more. It was reported to the Australian Financial Review only yesterday that the Abbott government would:

… aggressively defend its ambitious unwinding of Labor's future of financial advice (FoFA) laws …

Minister Cormann even wrote an editorial in the Financial Review expanding the merits of its recent reforms. The next day the attitude of the Abbott government had changed completely. The Financial Review reported this morning that the Abbott government:

… has frozen plans to immediately implement changes to laws banning commissions for financial advisers …

This was in direct contrast to Minister Cormann's statement on Twitter yesterday, when he claimed that this freeze had been in the work since Friday of last week. I find it unlikely that nobody in his office could get to the article before Monday to prevent his valiant defence of the FoFA reforms being printed. This is if we are charitable, and assume the op-ed was not written after he had allegedly 'changed his mind'.

The Abbott government's eleventh-hour decision to freeze the changes in the FoFA act shows that they are a government that do not know how to govern. They think a three-word slogan, not stakeholder consultation, is what is needed to form government policy. When these policies do not hold up in the harsh light of day, the cohesion of the Abbott government crumbles under pressure. The Prime Minister needs to take responsibility for the botched way this policy has been handled. He needs to acknowledge to the Australian people that these reforms are both unwelcome and have been badly run. The Abbott government should not just freeze these reforms; they should throw them on the same bonfire that they claim to be throwing red tape onto in Australia and put an end to them once and for all.

See this speech in context